Chapter 2: The benefits of blue-green infrastructure

This chapter describes the economic, social, environmental and cultural benefits of blue-green infrastructure (BGI) and emphasises its ability to deliver multifunctionality. BGI meets a number of needs, priorities and objectives on various scales, from communities to cities to strategies, through its multifunctionality, making it a critical infrastructure that is heavily dependent on design and planning. Against this backdrop, the chapter outlines the bigger context of BGI as an ‘infrastructure’ that is place-responsive, acts at different spatial and temporal scales, and builds in adaptive management to account for contextual change and nature’s complexity to ensure resilience into the far future. The chapter introduces the ‘four capitals’ approach, which can help frame engineering that is synergistic with system interdependency and delivery of different benefits from BGI. This enables organisations to understand how their success is directly or indirectly underpinned by natural, social, human and produced capital, empowering them to make decisions that offer the greatest overall value. The chapter summarises the role of engineers and other infrastructure professionals in weaving BGI into all infrastructure and urban systems, and all of the dimensions of governance (including policy) that shape them. This highlights the benefits of transformational change: creating and implementing interventions that operate synergistically for people and the societal, natural and built environment systems that support them. Four case studies from across the UK are included to demonstrate practice on the ground.